aiLights - When Privacy Meets AI: In-House Translation Powered by Apertus | Artificialy
This presentation introduces how Artificialy developed an on-premise AI translation solution for the Canton of Ticino, addressing the unique challenges of multilingual administration, sensitive data handling, and strict privacy requirements. It begins with an overview of Artificialy and its initial translation project deployed locally within the canton, followed by the specific needs that led the Canton of Ticino to request a secure, automated translation system.
The talk then explains the rationale behind selecting Apertus, Switzerland’s fully open-source large language model, highlighting benchmark results that demonstrate how the fine-tuned Apertus 8B model achieves high translation quality comparable to larger and proprietary alternatives. A technical deep dive outlines the fine-tuning process, dataset curation, and system architecture enabling secure, in-house deployment.
Finally, the presentation reviews performance outcomes, ongoing testing with cantonal employees, and future development steps. It concludes by emphasizing the benefits of sovereignty, confidentiality, and ethical AI adoption, positioning the solution as a scalable model for public sector innovation.
Speakers:
Christian Pala, Senior NLP Engineer
Dr. Athos Fiori, Head of AI Solutions
Christian Pala is a Senior NLP Engineer at Artificialy, focuses on state-of-the-art language models, fine-tuned solutions with particular expertise in low-resource languages, advanced translation systems, and Agentic AI.
Athos holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Basel and a MsC in Physics from the ETH Zürich. Over the past decade, he developed and implemented various cutting-edge AI solutions across various diverse range of industries.
💡 This session is part of our Apertus series.
📅 Date & Time: 12.05.2026, 15:00-15:45 (CET)
⏱️ Duration: 45 minutes
🌐 Language: English
🗣️ Format: Presentation + Q&A
📍 Location: Online (Zoom + YouTube Livestream)
👥 Audience: Public sector / government IT, AI/ML engineers & NLP practitioners, Data privacy & compliance officers, Open-source AI community
🤖 Field: NLP
🧠 Level: Intermediate
🔗 More information about aiLights: https://ailights.org/
We thank our partner Oertli-Stiftung for the support.
If you have any questions, please reach out to:
📧 [email protected]